KILLING IS DRUDGERY. Hours of scouting, of learning patterns.
Hynd stepped silently down the hall. Carpet. That was good. A patch of moonlight from the living-room window angled across him. Water ran at the end of the corridor. A toilet flushed. He heard her spit out toothpaste.
She wasn’t ready for him. Soon. A few more minutes. She was a widow, and this was unfinished business. The key to Cold Harvest lay with this woman.
He eased the door open in silence and examined the third bedroom. It was set up as a guest room and home office. Dust swirled in the light edging around the blinds and settled on the desk, a photographer’s workspace. Racks of hard drives, cameras, and lenses in Pelican cases stacked against the wall. He looked over the photos; there was one of a man fly-fishing in a river under aspen trees and another of a group on touring skis making their way across the top of a snow-covered cliff. The room was empty. It had sat untouched for a long time. He stepped out.
Light leaked from under the door of the master bedroom, then disappeared. He heard the creak of springs. He lingered in the hallway.
The house was an L-shaped ranch set back in the woods off a country road that snaked through the mountains outside Charlottesville. The nearest neighbor down the street went to bed at 11:35, after the nightly news. The newspaper was delivered by a man in a rusted-out Mercury wagon at 5:30 a.m. There were no late-night guests, no sexual partners. She slept alone in a home built for a family. He had bugged her phone, a process as simple as clipping into the telephone wires on the outside of the house.
He opened the door to the second bedroom. It would have been good for a child. They’d wanted roots here, had never planned to leave.
Did she know how her husband had died? Did she suspect the truth? Did she hope, in these long nights alone, to join him?
He checked his watch and returned to the hallway. Toe, heel, toe, heel. He stepped carefully, keeping the weight on the trailing leg, slowly applying it to the front, almost like a toddler’s walk, in order to remain silent. Awkward, but he had grown used to it, could do it quickly. He stood outside her door, listening to her breathe, waiting however long was necessary for her to fall fully asleep.
Hynd had others helping him. An operation this complex required many hands. Most were already inside this country. He had backup nearby, but he and his team were still working through stealth, disguising the murders, and stealth was easiest with one man.
Killing was his profession, and this job was simple: eliminate everyone in Cold Harvest. But he was more than a gun for hire. This cause was personal, and there was nothing he enjoyed more than the flush of adrenaline in his veins.
After so many hours of surveillance, he would begin to feel invincible: The woman down the street would walk the dog, the trash trucks would trundle by, the lights of the other houses in the valley would go on and off, all by his cue, and all the work would be rewarded. He would know the secret script of this environment, and soon he would feel like he was summoning it all, controlling it all himself.
Until this moment.
Because at some point, you have to put yourself in danger.
It was time. He twisted the knob and stepped into the room where she slept. The hardwood floor flexed gently as he shifted his weight to his forward foot. He leaned back, tried a spot a few inches over, and proceeded in silence.
When he came around, he could see her face, the mouth tight as if in anger. This was his next target, Carol Duncan, an executive recruiter. Her hands rested near the pillow, and she lay on her side. Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell, beneath the covers—deep sleep.
He took a breath in and could smell her: a clean, lotion-y fragrance. He put his hands on the foot of the bed. She turned slightly, more on her back, her face toward him.
There were easier ways to kill than this approach.
When you first teach soldiers to shoot, you make the target an abstraction. It’s not hard to fire at someone from a distance, to aim at a man or woman who might as well be a paper target.
When fighters get up close, the instinctive human revulsion at killing paralyzes most of them. They won’t take the shot even if their own lives are in danger. But the intimate work was his specialty. It took decades to unlearn every moral instinct.
This was the moment he loved, after all the silent watching. To get so close to that time where there was no script, only danger, only death, breathing the same air.
His shadow moved up the bare skin of her arm, toward her chest and neck.
He knew her now as well as anyone. He’d been watching her for days and had seen patterns she might not recognize herself. He’d gotten close to her, so close that he knew her mind, her reactions.
That was the hardest thing. You had to open yourself to the targets, to understand them at the most intimate, human level; in a way, to love them.
And then you had to kill them without hesitation or remorse and stare into their eyes while their lives drained away.
He felt the latex glove, clammy against his skin, as he closed his fingers around the barrel of the syringe. She whimpered and rolled onto her back, and then he reached out toward her.